Total Recall It’s late Christmas morning and most of the presents have been unwrapped and the bows and ribbons saved for another future gift wrapping while the wrapping paper gets crumpled up and thrown into a trash bag. Kim has perfected the Christmas morning program with everyone getting a big stocking stuffed with small joking wrapped gifts. The objective is to find things that are mildly appropriate and amusing and yet not so over-the-top that…
Father Knows Best In 1975 my best friend Paul convinced me to apply to business school at Cornell and to join him on his quest for strategic greatness in the business world. In those days I spent all my time with Paul and his young, sweet wife Ann and we often joked about his favorite childhood TV show, Father Knows Best, starring Robert Young and Jane Wyatt as the iconoclastic parents that represented the best…
Into the Death Zone I get my inspiration in many places, but none more than the here and now of what is right in front of my eyes. It’s late Saturday afternoon and I have spent an active day of gardening. I bought three trees and used my new power cart to place them on the back hillside where I want them to be planted. They were each heavy and the power cart was essential…
The Total Agony of Love The other night we watched a movie that was a Christmas movie made in 2021 called Love Hard. It was about a cool L.A. blogger who gets “catfished” by an Asian kid from Lake Placid. They spend the next few days pretending to be a couple and they fundamentally disagree about the best Christmas movie. It seems this subject, which I covered extensively a few days ago, is getting to…
Mistletoe We are gearing up for the holidays around here this week because we are scheduled to head out to NYC to see the kids for a few days. The last time we saw them was September when we were supposed to be heading to Spain and Portugal, but cancelled the motorcycle trip since some in our group were not so comfortable with the feinting surge in the Delta variant. So, we spent a week…
Ragamuffin A ragamuffin usually refers to a dirty and unkempt child, a waif, an urchin or a guttersnipe. It comes from a combination of old English, referencing the rags that adorn such a child and perhaps embellished by the Dutch from the word muffe, which means mittens. Those children with ragged mittens are ragamuffins. For some reason in Jamaican slang, a ragamuffin is a street tough, so less pitiful and more tomcat mongrel. Our little…
Traveling to Enlightenment We went to see the new Ridley Scott movie The Last Duel last night at the local Angelika Film Center. Once again, it was very lightly attended with a mere 8-10 people in the well-appointed theater. The film is set in 1386 or so and chronicles what was the end stages of the Middle Ages in Europe. The movie makes reference to the economic hardship to noblemen and their estates by virtue…
Calico Cats Quandry I currently subscribe to global news feeds including NYT, WAPO, WSJ and FT, but also read New Yorker, Esquire, Vanity Fair and NatGeo. Oh, very relevantly, I also read the monthly AARP Bulletin. When Apple News feeds me something I can’t read without subscribing, I generally pass and just absorb the headline. I also use Prime, Netflix, AppleTV, HBO Max and Hulu for subscription videos. I will ignore the social media subscriptions…
Easy Come, Easy Go I put in a bunch of expert witness work in August and September. In fact, I put in a total of 180 hours. In addition to that, I was preparing for and launching my course in Advanced Corporate Finance. I suppose that was another 40 hours of work. In the tradition of the 40-hour work week, those nine weeks would produce a time card of 360 hours. My math tells me…
Chillin’ With the Chillen’ Thomas and Jenna have been here for three days and have one day to go. From here they go to Colorado where they will do some hiking and getting to know Denver. Both Thomas and Jenna work hard and really wanted to use their time to relax. We offered them a whole array of things to do ranging from the famous San Diego Zoo to the San Juan Capistrano Mission, but…